Mr Jason Burgess from Ernst & Young
informed the Committee that the external auditors were required to
issue an annual audit letter to Staffordshire County Council
following completion of their audit procedures for the year ended
31 March 2017. The letter was shared
with Members. No questions were
asked.

Mrs Rebecca Lee introduced her report drawing
Members’ attention to some of the highlights in the report,
progress against key action points for 2016/17 and identifying key
priorities for 2017/18. The report
detailed the key successes of the service; gave details of Service
Level Agreements with schools and described what the Council was
doing to improve the health of the workforce. The Council has agreed a range of key performance
indicators, details of these were given in Appendix 1 to the
report. She went on to describe the
health and safety evaluation process; accident and incident data;
costs of accidents and incidents; internal health and safety
investigations; incidents during 2016/17; Health and Safety
Executive’s involvement; details of joint consultation; the
work of the Occupational Health Unit and details of liability
claims. New legislation and key topics for 2017/18 were described
and key actions.

In summary she stated that it had been a
successful year for the health, safety and wellbeing service,
although there remains room for improvement. The number of accidents, incidents and reportable
incidents had declined and the risk management audit reported a 100
per cent return. There was also a good
level of return for the Management Standards survey, although the
response from schools could be improved. Planned audits were completed.

To add to the points made in her report, she
stated that Personal Resilience Training had been in high demand
and extra courses had been added to the training programme.

Members asked for the reason behind the 588
incidents toward employees and were told that the number related
mainly to incidents in units with children with challenging
behaviour and was not due to aggression towards staff by the
public.

There had been a 29 per cent increase in the
staff absence due to psychological disorders. Members asked details of the reasons behind this
increase and were informed that the increase was spread across the
organisation, but with more cases in Families First where staff
were on the frontline. The significant
increase had followed a period when the figure had been in
decline. Mental health and wellbeing
was being discussed in the organisation and her Service was now
looking at what else they could do to raise awareness and encourage
staff to get help at an early stage so that they could get well and
return to work. One Member asked for
caution in the use of terminology, specifically the use of the term
‘psychological disorder’.

In regard to Fire Inspections, Members asked
in the light of the Grenfell Tower fire, if anything significant
had been found. Members were assured
that the main findings were around fire doors showing signs of wear
and tear and this had been reported for action to Strategic
Property. There are few buildings in
Staffordshire clad with ACM material and these are low level
buildings.

Members asked if the Council benchmarks itself
against other authorities. Mrs Lee
stated she met with colleagues in the West Midlands regularly but
the difficulty she had was ...
view the full minutes text for item 93.

Lisa Andrews, Interim Head of Audit and
Financial Services gave an overview of the internal audit external
quality assessment and asked Members to note the terms of reference
for the audit review scheduled to take place from 22 January 2018
for one week.

The report outlined the approach that the
assessment will follow. Standard 1300
outlines the requirements for a Quality
Assurance and Improvement Programme (QAIP) for the Internal Audit
Service and details the key aspects.

In addition, Standard 1310 sets out the requirements for the QAIP to include
both internal and external assessments. Following a Joint
Procurement exercise with local government colleagues, Ray Gard,
from CIPFA has been appointed as external quality
assessor. The review will be undertaken
through a process of interviews with key stakeholders, including
Members of the Audit and Standards Committee, the main external
clients and a document review.

The review will include a review of the number
of documents that are considered fundamental to the exercise and
these are listed in paragraph 8 of the report. The assessor would like to make a visit to the
Audit and Standards Committee but unfortunately there was not a
meeting scheduled at the point of this visit and may therefore send
out a questionnaire to Members. A
meeting will be scheduled with the Chairman of the Committee.

A final report will be produced and shared
with the Committee in March 2018. There
were no questions asked.

Lisa Andrews, Interim Head of Audit and
Financial Services updated Members on the progress against the
2017/18 Internal Audit Plan and the amendments to the original
Plan, including those audits that had been cancelled since its
approval in June 2017, in Appendix 1 of the report. Members were
asked to note that there had been a number of changes to the Plan
as a result of the introduction of the new Financial and Payroll
systems.

Members were asked to note the progress with
the implementation of high level recommendations made during
2017/18 – Appendix 2 of the report. The response rate from
Customer Satisfaction Surveys had continued to rise this
year. Work has concluded to re-procure
the Staffordshire External Support Contract. The Council will also use the NHS support contract
in addition when procuring external support to deliver the annual
plan.

With reference to the table on p50 of the
report, there were no limited assurance opinion reports to report
to Members since their last meeting.
Details of external clients were given and the in-house team
continues to deliver the Internal Audit function including the
management of the existing in-house team for South Staffordshire
Council.

Appendix 2 of the report detailed a number of
high level recommendations that had not been implemented by the
agreed date. Managers were actively
pursued until a response was received.
Following previous involvement of the Committee, arrangements were
more robust.

Lisa Andrews, Interim Head of Audit and
Financial Services outlined the progress made to date on
investigating the data matches received from the Cabinet Office In
January and May 2017 as part of the 2016 National Fraud
Initiative. The report outlined the
data sets submitted by the Council and Appendix 1 to the report
gave the amount recovered to date according to different match
types. The Council was pursuing the
recovering of a further £85,766.
Any learning from this activity will be shared to prevent further
problems going forward. Further details
will be given in the Internal Audit Annual Outturn Report which is
scheduled to be presented to the June 2018 meeting.

RESOLVED: Subject to an
interim External Audit Plan being added to the March agenda and
some minor amendments to clarify the wording, the Plan was
approved.

98.

Exclusion of the Public

The Chairman to move:-

“That the public be
excluded from the meeting for the following items of business which
involve the likely disclosure of exempt information as defined in
the paragraphs of Part 1 of Schedule 12A (as amended) of the Local
Government Act 1972 as indicated below”.

PART TWO

(reports in this section are
exempt)

Minutes:

The public were excluded by virtue of
paragraph(s) 3 of Part 1 of Schedule 12A of the Local Government
Act 1972.